"On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents - her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact - she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past, and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, what do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood? Told in the lush, lilting prose that led The San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," THE BUTTERFLY LAMPSHADE is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child"-- Provided by publisher

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE - A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD ' The Butterfly Lampshade is an unflinching, empathetic portrayal of a childhood touched by mental illness. As always, Aimee Bender's respect for the child and the child within translates into wisdom and magic on the page.' Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared On the night her mother is taken to a mental health hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is mesmerised by a lamp adorned with butterflies as she falls asleep. When she wakes, Francie sees a dead butterfly matching the ones on the lamp floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before anyone sees. Twenty-years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment and two other incidents that have haunted her life. But how close are her memories to reality, and will she ever be free of them?

Felice Bauer was Kafka's first great love and the inspiration for his first great fiction. Six weeks after they met, he wrote "The Judgment" for her in one night of feverish activity. Kafka always inferred to the traumatic, public breaking-off of their engagement as his "tribunal," and indeed he began work on The Trial within a month of that event. Kafka's letters to Felice offer rare insights into the writer's life and art. Elias Canetti's brilliant and sensitive examination of this moving correspondence to shows is the origins of Kafka's voice as a writer and his torment as a man.

Product Description Both an enhanced digital edition―the first edited specifically for undergraduates―and a handsome print volume, The Norton Shakespeare, Third Edition, provides a freshly edited text, acclaimed apparatus, and an unmatched value. The attractive print and digital bundle offers students a great reading experience at an affordable price in two ways―a hardcover volume for their dorm shelf and lifetime library, and a digital edition ideal for in-class use. Students can access the ebook from their computer, tablet, or smartphone via the registration code included in the print volume at no additional charge. As one instructor summed it up, “It’s a long overdue step forward in the way Shakespeare is taught.” Book Description with The Norton Shakespeare Digital Edition registration card About the Author Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Walter Cohen (Ph.D. Berkeley) is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Cornell University, where he received the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award. He is the author of Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, as well as numerous journal articles on Renaissance literature, literary criticism, the history of the novel, and world literature. He has recently completed a critical study entitled A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present. Jean E. Howard (Ph.D., Yale) is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. A past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, she is the author of numerous books on Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984), The Stage and Social Struggle (1994), Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories, with Phyllis Rackin (1997), Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (2007), and Marx and Shakespeare with Crystal Bartolovich (2012). She is at work on a book about the English history play from Shakespeare to Caryl Churchill and another on the invention of Renaissance tragedy. Katharine Eisaman Maus (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins) is James Branch Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Being and Having in Shakespeare; Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance; and Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind; editor of a volume of Renaissance tragedies; an

"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension, and it is the story of Jen Fein, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Her voice is searching, cuttingly perceptive, and darkly funny as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it"--

Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation--he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection

Joe and Joan Castleman are en route to Helsinki. Joe is thinking about the prestigious literary prize he will receive and Joan is plotting how to leave him. For too long Joan has played the role of supportive wife, turning a blind eye to his misdemeanours, subjugating her own talents and quietly being the keystone of his success...This is an acerbic and astonishing take on a marriage and the truth that behind the compromises, dedication and promise inherent in marriage there so often lies a secret.

From the French intellectual, novelist, essayist, critic, and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century: the second volume of Proust's monumental achievement Remembrance of Things Past , collecting The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain. In C. K. Scott Moncrieff's heralded original English translation, as revised by Terence Kilmartin based on the definitive French Pléiade edition. Marcel Proust's masterpiece is one of the towering literary works of the twentieth century. Relating its narrator's experiences in Belle Epoque France as he grows up, falls in love, and lives through the First World War, it has mesmerized generations of readers with its profound reflections on art, time, and memory.

"What effect does [the climate of censorship] have on a writer?....It's chilling. It's easy to become discouraged, to second-guess everything you write. There seemed to be no one to stand up to the censors....so I began to speak out about my experiences. And once I did, I found that I wasn't as alone as I'd thought." -- from Judy Blume's introduction to Places I Never Meant to Be Judy Blume is not alone: Many of today's most distinguished authors of books for young people have found their work censored or challenged. Eleven of them have contributed original stories to this collection. Along with a story written by the late Norma Klein when she was a student at Barnard College, they comprise a stunning literary achievement as well as a battle cry against censorship. Contributors David Klass Norma Klein Julius Lester Chris Lynch Harry Mazer Norma Fox Mazer Walter Dean Myers Katherine Paterson Susan Beth Pfeffer Rachel Vail Jacqueline Woodson Paul Zindel

"Spectacular . . . drops the reader through one trapdoor into another " A.J. FINN It all starts with an innocuous curiosity: at the Hotel de Verbier, a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps, there is no Room 622. This anomaly piques the interest of Joël Dicker, Switzerland's most famous literary star, who flees to the Verbier to recover from a bad breakup, mourn the death of his publisher, and begin his next novel. Before he knows it, he's coaxed out of his slump by a fellow guest, who quickly uncovers the reason behind Room 622's erasure: an unsolved murder. The attendant circumstances: a love triangle and a power struggle at the heart of Switzerland's largest private bank, a mysterious counter-intelligence unit known only as P-30, and a shadowy émigré with more money than God. A Russian doll of a mystery crafted with the precision of a Swiss watch, The Enigma of Room 622 is Joël Dicker's most diabolically addictive thriller yet. Praise for Joël Dicker "It's that most engaging of treats, a big, fat, intelligent thriller " SIMON MAYO "Dicker has the first-rate crime novelist's ability to lead his readers up the garden path" Sunday Express Translated from the French by Robert Bononno

Now a musical adaptation! In this delightful companion novel to Off the Page , #1 New York Times bestselling authors Jodi Picoult and her daughter and cowriter, Samantha van Leer, present a novel filled with romance, adventure, and humor in a story you’ll never forget. What happens when happily ever after…isn’t? Delilah is a bit of a loner who prefers spending her time in the school library with her head in a book—one book in particular. Between the Lines may be a fairy tale, but it feels real. Prince Oliver is brave, adventurous, and loving. He really speaks to Delilah. And then one day Oliver actually speaks to her. Turns out, Oliver is more than a one-dimensional storybook prince. He’s a restless teen who feels trapped by his literary existence and hates that his entire life is predetermined. He’s sure there’s more for him out there in the real world, and Delilah might just be his key to freedom. A romantic and charming story, this companion novel to Off the Page will make every reader believe in the fantastical power of fairy tales.

An Edgar(R) Award Nominee for Best Novel Jesse Kellerman--the international bestselling author of The Executor and The Genius-- brings his prodigious talent to bear on a topic he knows well in this hilarious and surprising spin on the modern blockbuster thriller novel. Missing for months after a tragic boating accident, William de Vallée, the superstar thriller writer, is pronounced dead. His oldest friend, Arthur Pfefferkorn, receives the news with an unsettling mix of grief and envy. A middle-aged college professor with long-dead literary aspirations, Pfefferkorn can't help but feel outshone by his friend's success--especially since he married the woman Pfefferkorn loved. But now Bill is gone, and Pfefferkorn is there to comfort Carlotta in her time of grief. Reconnecting with de Vallée's widow makes more than one of his dreams come true . . . until it plunges him into a shadowy world of intrigue and double crosses, where no one can be trusted--and nothing can be taken seriously.

Originally published in 1973, the groundbreaking, uninhibited story of Isadora Wing and her desire to fly free caused a national sensation. In "The New York Times," Henry Miller compared it to his own classic, "Tropic of Cancer" and predicted that "this book will make literary history..." It has sold more than twelve million copies. Now, after thirty years, the revolutionary novel known as "Fear of Flying" still stands as a timeless tale of self-discovery, liberation, and womanhood.

Jane Addison is an ambitious young woman with big dreams of owning her own company someday. At twenty-eight, she arrives in New York to start a job at Fletcher and Benson, a prestigious talent agency. Eager to impress her new colleagues, Jane jumps right in as an assistant to Hailey West, one of the agents in the literary department.[Bokinfo]

A father tries to stave off a nervous breakdown when a family trip to SeaWorld shades into the sinister; a porn critic discovers that, despite his best intentions, his reputation—not to mention the stacks of smut lining his apartment—precedes him; an out-of-work avant-garde stage director begins to test his limits in the theater of life; desperate forgotten comic book characters find themselves suddenly stranded on a desert island. With his celebrated wit and invention, Lethem brilliantly transforms the real into the surreal, uncovering the absurdity always lurking in the mundane, the twin forces of humor and tragedy that bracket experience, and the lasting desire—even in the face of all that goes awry—for human connection.

A Master Storyteller Creates an Enduring Legend of His Own Over the centuries, the once stern rulers of Al-Rassan have been seduced by sensuous pleasures. Now King Almalik of Cartada is on the ascendancy, adding city after city to his realm, aided by his friend and advisor, the notorious Ammar ibn Khairan--poet, diplomat, soldier--until a summer day of savage brutality changes their relationship forever. Meanwhile, in the north, the Jaddite's most celebrated--and feared--military leader, Rodrigo Belmonte, and Ammar meet. Sharing the interwoven fate of both men is Jehane, the beautiful, accomplished court physician, whose own skills play an increasing role as Al-Rassan is swept to the brink of holy war, and beyond.... In a magnificent setting, hauntingly evocative of medieval Spain, The Lions of Al-Rassan is both a brilliant adventure and a deeply moving story of love, divided loyalties, and what happens to men and women when hardening beliefs begin to remake--or destroy--a world.

Auster's tale of family dynamics past and present from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy : 'a literary voice for the ages' ( Guardian ) 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain . . .' So begins Paul Auster's remarkable novel, The Brooklyn Follies . Set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, it tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career, and, indeed, from life in general. Having accidentally ended up in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood, they discover a community teeming with life and passion. When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts that offers them the possibility of redemption. Infused with character, mystery and humour, these lives intertwine and become bound together as Auster brilliantly explores the wider terrain of contemporary America - a crucible of broken dreams and of human folly.

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

The Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

In this sentimental, didactic fable, Masson imagines how the lone, nonsocial, domesticated animal came to share hearth and home.Billi, an Asian leopard cat, lives in a mango forest in ancient India. He enjoys his independence, but he feels pangs of loneliness and curiosity about the "two-foots." He learns their languages - Hindi, Malayam and Sanskrit - and he can "see the appeal of south India's three major religions."Billi embarks on a quest to learn more about humans by discovering what their animals think of them. A water buffalo mourns being underappreciated; a parrot bemoans his cage; a mongoose tells a chilling story about human ingratitude. Billi reminds a cow that it's worshipped by humans. "Oh, great," the cow says. "That and five rupees will get you a chapati."Nine months of travel and no truly good word for humans leaves Billi undeterred and, back home, he seeks out a young girl he'd often watched. It's not easy proving his good intentions or trying to be "the only animal to have a mutually satisfying relationship with humans," but Billi makes it happen in a story that's heartwarming not only for the passionate cat fan but for all readers.A novelette from the author of Raising the Peaceable Kingdom.